The two-slit experiment is usually treated as a riddle about what really happens. Within a relational ontology, it becomes something more precise and more interesting: a demonstration of how instances themselves are re-construed as our understanding of potential matures.
What evolves here is not the phenomenon. The screen still records dots. What evolves is what those dots are taken to be instances of, and what ontological work we ask them to do.
1. The Instance as the Outcome of Readiness
In the earliest construal, the interference pattern is read as the result of a system’s readiness being triggered.
The wavefunction is taken to be inclined and able to produce certain outcomes, and the pattern on the screen is the final actualisation of that readiness. The instance appears as the endpoint of a process: something latent has finally shown itself.
On this reading:
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The dots are treated as evidence of an underlying wave-like process.
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The pattern is asked to reveal what was “really going on.”
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The instance bears a heavy representational burden.
This construal is intuitive, but it imports temporal, causal, and revelatory assumptions that the ontology will later abandon.
2. The Instance as Occupation of a Space of Possibilities
As readiness metaphors are set aside, the interference pattern is re-understood as the occupation of a structured space of possibilities.
The dots no longer release latent tendencies; they instantiate constrained possibilities defined by the experimental arrangement. The pattern manifests regularity, not revelation.
This is a conceptual improvement:
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The instance no longer points behind itself.
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It expresses structure rather than hidden process.
Yet a residue remains: the pattern still risks being treated as a picture of an underlying space, rather than as an intelligible regularity across events.
3. The Instance as Satisfaction of a System
With the move to system as theory of instances, the status of the interference pattern changes decisively.
The wavefunction and apparatus jointly specify a system of possible events. Each detection is an instance that satisfies those constraints. The pattern is not produced by the wavefunction, nor does it represent it.
The instance is now fully de-representationalised. It does not point beyond itself; it is intelligible because the system exists, not because it discloses one.
4. The Perspectival Cut: Potential and Instance
The familiar tension between wave and particle dissolves once potential and instance are treated as poles of description rather than stages of a process.
From one cut:
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The system is apprehended as potential.
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The wavefunction specifies what could count as an event.
From another cut:
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Each detection is an instance.
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The “interference pattern” is not a single phenomenon but an aggregation across events.
5. The Pattern as an Instance Type, Not a Thing
At this point, the interference pattern itself can be properly located.
It is a recognisable regularity across instances — an instance type that emerges under locally constrained sub-potentials defined by slit geometry, boundary conditions, and system structure.
This preserves the explanatory force of the pattern without reifying it.
6. Horizon: The Next Possible Event
With the notion of horizon, attention shifts from the completed pattern to the edge of what could happen next.
At any moment:
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The screen has a horizon of possible detections.
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That horizon is shaped by the system and by the history of prior events.
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Each new dot slightly reshapes the field of subsequent possibilities.
The interference pattern is no longer static. It is the historical accretion of constrained events, each one locally novel, none of them revelatory.
7. The Pattern as Historical Trace
In the mature construal, the interference pattern is a historical record.
It is not:
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A picture of the wavefunction
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Evidence of hidden ontology
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A manifestation of underlying substance
It is:
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The sedimentation of relationally constrained instances
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A stable form that emerges without teleology
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A trace of how potential has been locally actualised over time
Nothing mystical remains — and nothing explanatory is lost.
Where This Leaves Us
At the end of this trajectory:
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The wavefunction is potential-as-system.
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The dots are first-order instances.
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The interference pattern is a second-order construal of regularity.
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Paradox dissolves into perspectival clarity.
The two-slit experiment stops being a puzzle about reality and becomes a clean demonstration of how system and instance, potential and event, relate under different cuts.
And that, I think, is exactly where the work now stands.
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